Update: The competition is now over. Thank you to everyone who entered, and worked hard to make sure the news of the petition reached as many people as possible. We will announce the winners shortly.

Vaping Under Threat

In the US, the campaign against the electronic cigarette, having failed to have the e-cig banned, is planning to make using e-cigarettes as difficult and unpleasant as possible.Here are some of the campaign’s aims:

NOflavours except tobacco and menthol.

NO online sales.

NO choice of nicotine strength.

NO vaping indoors.

NO vaping outdoors on dozens of hospital, government, and college grounds across the country.

NO hiring people who use nicotine in any form, including e-cigarettes, the gum, and the patch.

Remember – neither e-cigarettes nor nicotine not cause non-vapers harm, and according to research and scientists the e-cigarette is no more harmful than a cup of coffee. This campaign is not about protecting people, it is about protecting existing financial interests.

The Petition

We’re holding a petition!

Fortunately, Americans can protest against this – simply by signing an online petition. Unfortunately, the petition hasn’t yet reached the 5,000 signatures it needs to be addressed by the Whitehouse. Not reaching the 5000 mark would be a disaster:

it would show politicians people don’t care about vaping

to do the same again, following Whitehouse changes to how petitions work, would need 25,000 signatures

While this is a UK blog, the vaping world is a close knit one (UK and US vapers chat every day online) and we’d like to help our American vaper friends. Although if you are British you can’t sign the petition, you can help by spreading awareness about it, and by urging others to do the same. (After all, American vapers can’t sign it if they don’t know about it.) And of course, if you are an American vaper, or an American whose seen the positive benefits vaping can have on smokers – get over there and sign it!

To encourage people to share the petition, we are holding a competition.

1. Share the news about the petition.

Tell everybody!

There’s lots of ways you can do this:

use one of the buttons below this post

tweet the petition

post the petition on your facebook page

post the petition on a forum

post the petition on google plus

write about the petition on your blog

email the petition to everyone you know who might care, urging them to sign the petition if they are American, and to forward the email whether or not they are American

any other favourite ways of sharing information

Already shared the petition? No problem, just share it again!

2. Leave a comment below telling us how you shared the post.

This is important – you must tell us how you shared the competition, or we won’t know that you have entered the competition!

Ultra-Important Note: You can’t enter the competition by signing the petition. The only reason to sign it is because you care about vaping and/or smokers whose lives have been changed by vaping. We are holding this competition is to try and help spread the word to people who care.

The Prizes

The first prize is one of our super-duper luxury Smoker’s HALO electronic kits.

And the second prize is our amazing new refillable electronic cigarette, The Smoker’s Halo tank, which comes with two bottles of UK manufactured e-liquid.

But it’s possible to win one of up to nine mini electronic cigarette kits too – our smallest starter kits which come with two high-capacity refills with inbuilt dual-core atomisers all set in a sleek, silver e-cigarette case.

But we are only going to hand out these extra nine kits if we have one hundred entrants or more (as measured by the number of comments below) into the competition.

Why? Because we want to spread the word of this petition far and wide.

So get your friends to enter the competition and share the petition too – remember, it’s all in a good cause!

Author:About James Dunworth

Main blogger at the Ashtray Blog, co-author of a University of Alberta study of "Electronic cigarettes as potential harm reduction products", co-author of the book: "Electronic Cigarettes: What the Experts Say." Works at ecigarettedirect.co.uk.

Thanks for sharing, Sal. I’ve been trying to get rid of that “The comments plugin requires an href parameter.” message for months (have a programmer looking at it right at this moment) but so far no success. Fortunately, it doesn’t actually seem to stop people from commenting.

I can hardly believe what you say about trying to stop people using e-cigarettes … my husband has been smoking for 40 years and I was worried – he stopped smoking cigarettes without a backward glance and can now breathe. What’s a little nicotine in comparison to all the tar and chemicals that were going into his lungs?

When your company goes public I’m buying shares – I think tobacco is about to go the same way as the dodo.